Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
about.fb.com862 points by impish9208 8 days ago
862 points by impish9208 8 days ago
I'd like to hear an informed take from anybody who thinks that Facebook's fact-checkers were a better product feature than Community Notes.
All of the articles I'm seeing about this online are ideological, but this feels like the kind of decision that should have been in the works for multiple quarters now, given how effective Notes have been, and how comically ineffective and off-putting fact-checkers have been. The user experience of fact-checkers (forget about people pushing bogus facts, I just mean for ordinary people who primarily consume content rather than producing it) is roughly that of a PSA ad spot series saying "this platform is full of junk, be on your guard".
The ideological bits are:
* Dana White added to the board.
* "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?!
The actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would be fine with some experimentation. But it looks pretty political in the broader context, so maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now.
I can't quite FB entirely, but Threads looks like a much less interesting option with Blue Sky being available and gaining in popularity.
I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. Community Notes has been that successful, and Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster.
I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; I am warmly supportive of intrusive moderation; that's not where I'm coming from.
Clegg left a few days ago, and the Oversight Board issued a statement which sounds like they were in the dark:
> “We look forward to working with Meta in the coming weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.” [1]
So is it possible this was only announced recently. It might have been "in the works" in the C-suite for a bit longer, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence it was widely known before very recently.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-face...
As a product decision taken independently, maybe. Running one of those things at scale with all kinds of people trying to subvert it for various reasons, including some downright evil ones, is not an easy task.
Announced together with everything else and given the timing, I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.
> I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.
"We're moving to Texas to eliminate perceptions of bias" is the biggest giveaway of this.
Austin is very left of center. If they end up there, they will have ideologically strayed in California while geographically moving to Texas.
Infowars was based in Austin. Joe Rogan is in Austin. How does moving to Austin mean they are "ideologically" in California?
Visit Texas. Then visit Austin. You'll know what I mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Joe Rogan also moved from California.
Elon too, isnt it cheaper taxes for business there?
i mean they can just pretend and get paid